In the shipping container art, there are many container designs that are manufactured for various end uses. One popular end use for a container is holding fresh fruits and produce during the transportation process (i.e., packing and shipping), and for displaying at the retail level. Usually when packing produce, such as tomatoes, peaches, mangos and the like, there is a typical size requirement in that the container volume is sized to hold a certain amount of product. There is also a strength requirement given the weight of the product packed and the shipping and handling requirements. Such containers are generally rectangular and have a variable height dimension ranging from three to twelve inches. Further, these containers are typically transported, stored, and displayed in a stacked configuration.
A well known single piece container design for holding produce is a single-piece tray type where a single piece of corrugated cardboard is cut and scored to form a flat blank. The blank has a bottom, two side walls hinged to the bottom and at least two end walls hinged to the bottom. To form the container, the walls of the blank are folded upwardly to be normal to the bottom and then connected to form the containment volume within the four walls. Variations are well known where top closure flaps are hinged to the top edges of the side walls, and for stacking strength, a second end wall can be hinged to the top edge of first end wall to then form a double layer of material thereby enhancing the stacking strength.
As was mentioned above, the tray-type containers are typically stacked on top of one another during shipping, storing, and displaying at the retail level. To that end, suitable stacking strength is one requirement of these types of containers so that the containers can be stacked as much as twenty containers high. One drawback with stacking containers into a unitized load is that the stacking strength is reduced if the containers are misaligned. To address this problem, stacking tabs and associated apertures have been added to the standard tray-type container to aid in the alignment of the stacked containers when stacked into a unitized load, while also maintaining the alignment of the containers during the transportation process. However, the current tray-type containers with stacking tabs only allow for stacking in a column style configuration (i.e. the longitudinal axis of each container are parallel with one another). Therefore, with the advent of stacking tabs, it has been the desire of the container industry to develop a tray type-container with stacking tabs that is stackable in the column configuration, as well as other stacking configurations, such as an interlocking configuration.